Except that Ms. Rivas, who was all over the academic/literary blogosphere last fall defending a controversially inclusive new poetry anthology edited by Rita Dove, isn’t always tranquil.

A long poem from the new collection, “Don’t Tell Me Brother: Years of September Fallout Are Still Ahead,” addresses the personal aftermath of 9/11, starting with an icy eyewitness description, before slipping into a “breakdown,” and out again:

“where I, head down pounding the conference table, bellowed and sobbed, I know what this is! where I finally had the revelation where I picked up my head and looked into the doctor’s ignorant face and snarled: This is grief; this is grief”

The speaker, the poem makes it clear, might easily have lost her mind after the attack.

Accordingly, the beach at Lemon Creek, now parkland, is littered “with driftwood and condoms.” And yet ancient rhythms survive: “In blue moonlight they wait. for horseshoe crabs mad with sex to clamber onto the sand on a full moon”

Bits of Ms. Rivas’s usage are bedazzling. In a nostalgic lapsed-Catholic vein, she considers the life and times of St. Rose of Lima, caught “in the steel trap of a ring of hosannas.” A “ring of hosannas?” It’s a chorus of angels.

She divulges things she has learned about herself and her own history in perfectly compressed language. If there’s a lesson in these small epiphanies, you extract it for yourself.

Writing about her mother, now gone, she develops a litany of skillfully compressed recollections memories and observations. And then she loses patience with all of it. Poetry isn’t therapy.

“I miss you more than my fingers can write on this worn-out keyboard, Oh, my mother gentle drops of harbor rain. and breezes blowing south will not unloosen this knot of grief that moors me here today.”

A boomer who grew up on the South Shore just as the new Verrazano-Narrows Bridge launched the rapid-development phase that continues today, Ms. Rivas recognizes the complexities of change, what it brings and what it takes away.

In “I Will,” a manifesto that nearly spits in the eye of age, time and exhaustion, she declares that much is not only possible, it is likely. She looks forward to talking travel, flings, Paris. Near the end, when it’s time to mention one-on-one romantic love, she nearly loses her hard-won equanimity. “I will Be loved truly some day and just once more I shall love truly in return. Where oh where in this big world are you”